PressTV talks with Dr. Webster Griffin Tarpley, author and historian from Washington, regarding the issue. Below is an approximate transcript of the interview.

Press TV: We recently saw a massacre take place in the city of Turaymisah, which many liken to the Houla massacre. Despite that, the question is who benefits from such crimes?

Tarpley: I think it is clear that NATO and the armed opposition, the death squads in effect, are the ones that benefit from these actions and I would caution everybody to realize that most of the reports that we get from Syria are totally unreliable and this has to do with the corruption of Western media and also with the school of journalism that is based on ‘activists say.’

In this current conflict, when you hear a report that starts with ‘activists say,’ that is the equivalent of an embedded reporters say during the Afghan war or during the Iraq war. Now so far we were told with widely different estimates of the victims that 100, 200 or 250 would have been killed in this village that you mentioned.

At the same time, now they were already in the early phase reports that diverge from the official story. NATO claims that this is a massacre carried out by Assad but there are other reports in the international media that say that the majority of those killed were Assad’s supporters and that the massacre was cynically carried out by opposition fighters who know that they benefit because whenever anybody is killed in Syria, naturally the controlled Western media blame that on Assad.

Another version of it is that the Syria army was passing through this village, came under heavy attack, successfully counterattacked, and in the process, there were a number of victims from among the ranks of the Free Syrian Army and the other death squads.

I would also urge people to go back and look at recent cases. There was a massacre in the Hama area in April which has now been attributed to the rebels, not to the pro-Assad forces. In Houla, we have the large massacre at the end of April. The United Nations official Paulo [Sérgio] Pinheiro has already conceded that there is no evidence at all that was done by Assad forces.

We have also got John Williams of the BBC with a memo which has been not widely circulated but he says that the BBC coverage of the Houla massacre was completely without basis and evidence; it was based on propaganda from the opposition groups.

And we have got the most authoritative the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, leading conservative newspaper in Germany, that pretty much categorically states the Houla massacre was carried out by the Free Syrian Army and other related groups.

We have also got the fact that when the Houla massacre occurred, the BBC posted a photograph which actually showed a massacre by US forces in Iraq almost 10 years before and they put that up. It had been the work of Marco Di Lauro of Getty Images.

So the eagerness of the Western media to portray massacres, I think, betrays who actually carries these things out. It is done under the auspices of NATO.

Press TV: You spoke of the Free Syrian Army. We have the Opposition or the Free Syrian Army openly saying that it will use assassinations to reach its objectives. Why when it is openly speaking of using force and aggression is the opposition not condemned, neither by the US nor the UN?

Tarpley: This of course reflects the hypocrisy of Hillary Clinton, [William] Hague, [Laurent] Fabius and others; …, I am afraid, falls into the same category. It also has to do with the methodology of the Syrian observatory for human rights because they are, in some ways, the world flagship of these reports and naturally for Mr. Rahman who operates out of Coventry, England, anybody killed in Syria is automatically a victim of Assad.

There are no exceptions and this is really Orwellian because, at the same time, we know that there are armed gangs, death squads, in Syria; al-Qaeda members are armed by Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey under the supervision of CIA case officers.

I would urge people take a look at The Guardian of the UK; look at that website today. There is an excellent article by Charlie Skelton and Charlie Skelton in this article goes through who the Syrian opposition is and one of the people that he talks about is Mr. Rahman of the Syrian observatory. It is widely reported that that guy is a close friend of Rifaat al-Assad who is of course the renegade brother of the former president of Syria.

Press TV: Now Russia has been pushing to get Iran involved in this scenario. What is there that Iran can do that others cannot?

Tarpley: I think Iran along with Russia, along with China, can contribute to the creation of a bloc of states in the world that simply refused this blackmail.

You can see Hillary Clinton this afternoon has been screaming that now it is imperative, it is incumbent on Russia and China to collapse, to give up their opposition in the Security Council against chapter 7 measures and it is against an invasion, bombing and a large-scale war.

I think the more countries that participate in that, the better it is and I think Iran has an important role to play there but I think that it is quite possible that the imperialists have overplayed their hand now and that their methods are becoming more and more known and more and more discredited. So that is another important function.